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It's been a long time since we last posted an update on how the site is doing and where we are going. Recently you may have noticed numerous site changes that appeared poorly executed with little to no advance notice. Our success depends on the community, so I apologize for the lack of communication on our part and hope this will clear things up

What happened

Over the past year the site has been largely ticking along, with no substantial involvement from the administrators or technical team (myself included - I recently took a long unplanned leave). Our supervisors @Allan and @fantomas1 have done an excellent job coping with the situation as well as our moderating team. I am extremely thankful to have such a dedicated team who pushed forward regardless

For several years now we were planning on updating the site to the latest version of the Invision Community software, but always ran into time constraints with the theme, add-ons, and server configuration. The theme you see now was developed 2 years ago but not put online until this year. Every time we tried to put together the update there was always some issue that set us back and hurt our motivation. About a year ago now I had to leave unexpectedly which resulted in even more slowdowns and the update was essentially put indefinitely on hold

As some of you know, the site is owned by Fubra, an internet company based in the UK, but run by people like myself who are part of the community. Typically they are responsible for the hardware, while the community takes charge of the software. With the administration largely absent, the forum software was growing very old and badly needed an update. Fubra decided for security reasons it was best to perform the update as soon as possible, which left us uncoordinated and flat footed

Over the past 2 months I have tried to spend more time applying fixes and reporting issues to the owners, but my personal life has been quite hectic recently and gotten in the way. This has unfortunately resulted in a bit of back-and-forth with themes, fixes, and general site performance. I has a chat with them last week and we are now much better coordinated and can push forward together

Where we are now

This morning I reset the theme for all members onto the new InsanelyMac theme, so this completes the bulk of update work! Compared to last year we now have:

Latest Invision Community software

HTTPS (!)

High resolution support/new theme

This is a vast improvement over the previous setup, and I hope this is a good start for more things to come

Where we want to go

All this said, we still have a long way to go before the site is where we want it to be both content and performance wise. I would love to have some feedback from you guys, so if you have any suggestions then let us know!

Chat

The old IRC chat is still online (irc://irc.insanelymac.com, http://chat.insanelymac.com:8080/), but currently inaccessible through the chat page. This time around we are open to either improving/re-integrating our IRC channel, or using a different system. This really depends both on the feasibility as well as feedback from the community

Hardware database

A long planned feature has always been the HWDB, a wiki-like idea that allows us to collect information about various hardware and how it performs on the various macOS versions. Feature-wise this would allow you to

Post hardware and the steps for configuration

Discover supported/unsupported hardware

Put together "computers" for your profile/signature

etc.

This is probably an endless project, but I hope it turns out to be useful

Team

Our team works tirelessly to provide a great site experience, but is still in need of a big refresh! We used to recruit on a yearly basis, but have been a bit behind on this. If you are an active member and have an interest in helping out, send a line to our of our supervisors for more info

Cleanup

There are a few cleanup issues with the theme, site configuration, and addons that were disabled with the update. If you notice anything that needs changing let us know!

Performance

The site performance has been subpar recently, and we'd really like to change this. At the moment we're in discussions with the owners to figure out a plan as to what's possible, and I hope to have something soon enough